Blind Date Read Online Free PDF Page A

fumes. Hurray! She succeeds and bears her scars nobly. “It was in a good cause,” she said, falteringly, from her bed of pain. “Of course I would do it again.” The shy, brave darling, wincing slightly at the intensity of the camera flash, cornflower-blue eyes as bashful as a princess. We love you, Elisabeth.
    There was a man with a camera on the lecture room stage. She blinked at him, unable to detect personality; a photographer, she guessed, hidden by the glare, hired to record what the surgeon was about to describe. His purpose did not include communicating with the patient. She could not see his features, felt rather than saw a smile as he darted forward, knelt as if abject, raised his thumb, like that, and retreated into the shadows until summoned again. A tall man, with a pony-tail.
    Celebrity. Heroine. Fool. You add insult to your own injury, letting yourself in for this, ticking the box, giving permission to be arranged so carefully on a trolley, paraded like a corpse at a state funeral. She was bidden to lie as still as if the couch was really a coffin. Reclining at the moment, with her back to the audience, spine exposed. Dream on, for a minute. Please, give me another minute.
    â€¦
Miss Kennedy, resourceful ex-police officer, is currently indisposed after her outrageously courageous pursuit of an armed robber, who had terrorized the neighbourhood … She floored him after a desperate pursuit, alone, unaided, unarmed, despite his knife … then she dived into ice … Our heroine on the mend … We are proud of her.
    Elisabeth interrupted her own daydream. Her mother would have liked this version, too.
    The surgeon coughed, clearing his throat. “As to the cause of these injuries, ladies and gents, well, a sad tale. Elisabeth here was coming out of a pub, at the end of a birthday celebration. She took a short cut on her way home. Possibly not paying a great deal of attention, eh Elisabeth?” He patted her rump. “She tripped and fell. Unfortunately, there was at large at the time a madman who had taken to attacking young people of the district with various kinds of acidic fluids. In this case, caustic, which he either threw at or over Miss Kennedy. Her injuries are the more severe because she had fallen, because she was unconscious and therefore lay in this liquid for some time …”
    Don’t sayit, she pleaded silently. Don’t say, she was
drunk.
As a skunk. Going home alone after an argument in a pub, tripping over … going to sleep in acid, because she was stupid drunk. Unable to remember much after. Failure.
    â€œShe lay on her right arm and hip. Her chin also had contact with the caustic, but thankfully, movement of the head has minimized injuries here, while the elbow was burnt to the bone, with considerable inroads made into the flesh to the rear of the hip. Well, we couldn’t mend that with skin grafts alone, could we now? So what we’re talking about here is rebuilding that muscle with muscle of a similar type.”
    With loving care, he traced the long, puckered scar which led from the left of her mid-spine, into the left buttock.
    â€œSo we took it from here … and here. The skin to cover it came from the inner thighs … Here, and here.”
    She was sitting now, as guided, legs wide apart on the edge of the trolley, the gown bunched modestly, revealing no more than two expanses of purpled flesh. Healing: almost healed, but still as sore as if she had been dragged over gravel, and despite the modesty of the gown, the pose was faintly indecent. Then, again as instructed, she lay back, holding the right arm, temporarily freed from the sling and the bandage, across her chest, keeping her eyes to the ceiling, refusing to look at her own, reconstituted flesh. To think she had ever worried about her weight.
    â€œThe damage to the ribcage and the neck have been slow to heal and resistant, up until now, to any kind of graft. The